Breakout Sessions
Participants will partake in four of seven possible breakout workshops, taught by instructors from CMU, Pitt, and elsewhere. You must register for your preferred breakout sessions here by Wednesday 5/22.
None of the workshops require previous experience in math or programming.
Getting Started with Machine Learning: Logistic Regression in Digital Humanities
Matthew Lavin, Clinical Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Digital Media Lab, University of Pittsburgh
Tuesday May 28, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall 154A) and Thursday May 30, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Baker Hall 154A)
Some of the most exciting recent scholarship in digital humanities, and especially in the burgeoning cultural analytics subfield, have involved training a machine learning model to categorize/classify documents into categories, in the hopes of discovering something meaningful about the underlying patterns that inform machine learning predictions. Logistic regression is a well-established machine learning method that many digital humanities or cultural analytics practitioners, including David Bamman, Hoyt Long, Richard So, and Ted Underwood, have employed. It’s especially appealing because the rules used to make predictions are transparent, and it’s relatively easy to derive a list summarizing how much predictive power each input variable has. In this workshop, participants will look closely at how machine learning research design, how logistic regression makes predictions, and how to run classification in Python.
Computer Simulations as a Method for Philosophy
Kevin Zollman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday May 29, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall A60N)
I will discuss the ways that computer simulations can be thought of as a philosophical method. I will connect simulation with extant philosophical problems, and show why it is a superior tool for certain types of problems. In the accompanying workshop, I will work with students on exploring a simulation using the simulation platform NetLogo. We will learn how to study simulations and discuss what one can and cannot learn from them. (Scott Weingart’s addendum: In this workshop, you will learn to teach a computer simple instructions about how you believe the world works, and use those instructions to simulate the possible consequences of these modeled beliefs. This can be used to explore, for example, how language evolves, how flocks of birds form, how social networks grow, and whether segregation can occur even when homebuyers hope for diverse neighbors.)
Software requirements: Download and install NetLogo
Data Visualization with Tableau
Emma Slayton, CLIR Fellow for Data Visualization, Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday May 29, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Baker Hall 154A) and Wednesday May 29, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall 154A)
Are you currently involved in work that could be augmented by visualizing your data for analysis or to communicate your findings to the public? Would you like to further your skills or learn new ways to make charts, graphs, maps, or other types of visualizations? Come to a workshop that provides a background to creating successful graphs and charts. Data visualization, or the techniques used to visually display or communicate data, is an obvious output of our research or data analysis. The idea is to quickly and clearly display data for purposes of analysis or presentation. Being able to effectively communicate your data to an audience is a necessary part of any project, and is made easier through the use of visualization programs like Tableau. In this workshop, we will discuss the basic capabilities of Tableau as well as take a hands-on approach to using the program.
Software requirements: Please come to the workshop with a copy of Tableau downloaded on your laptop. You can register for a free one-year student license through this link: https://www.tableau.com/academic/students
Introduction to Network Analysis for Humanists
Elaine Frantz (Parsons), Professor of History, Kent State University
Tuesday May 28, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall A53) and Wednesday May 29, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Baker Hall A60N)
This is a simple and practical-minded workshop aimed at those with little background in DH which will seek to help you understand whether social network analysis is right for your data and for your research questions; discuss strategies for and problems with converting data into formats usable by network analysis programs; show you the fundamentals of building a network using the popular Gephi program; and walk you through an exercise in which you build and manipulate a small network.
Software requirements: Please come to the workshop with a copy of Gephi 9.2 installed on your laptop: https://gephi.org/users/download/
GIS and Mapping
Jessica Benner, Computer Science and GIS Librarian, Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday May 29, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Baker Hall A53) and Wednesday May 29, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall A53)
This workshop will introduce you to the use of geographic information systems (GIS). GIS are tools that allow you to explore the geographic aspects of your data. Whether you study the material culture of a particular community, the works of an eighteenth century writer, or the history of the civil rights movement, there is likely a spatial component to your data. You can add this by collecting spatial information related to your other data. Spatial information can be as coarse as countries, states, counties or zip codes, or as precise as addresses and coordinate pairs. These types of data are used in an GIS tool to help you visualize your data in a spatial context (i.e., a map). During this workshop, you will (1) learn about what a GIS is, different models for representing spatial data, the fundamental aspects of a map, (2) explore several existing DH projects that have a spatial focus or spatial components, and (3) practice determining when the use of GIS is appropriate for a project.
Ching! Creating Tidy Humanities Data that Sparks Joy
Matthew Lincoln, Digital Humanities Developer, Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday May 28, 1:00 - 3:00 PM (Baker Hall A60N) and Thursday May 30, 10:00AM - 12:00PM (Baker Hall A60N)
A lot of tools and tutorials out there promise to help you clean up your messy data, which is an essential step before doing any kind of network, text, spatial, or quantitative analysis or visualization. But how do we even figure out what “clean” means when it comes to complex humanities knowledge, especially when we may not yet know what kind of analysis we eventually want to do? Participants will come out of this workshop understanding how to create a data plan to capture the parts of their sources that are going to be important for their research questions, handle complex relationships and uncertainty, and format that information into tidy data that can then be reshaped as needed to drive databases, websites, analyses, and visualizations. We will combine pen & paper exercises with some introductory work in R, although the principles will apply to all kinds of programming languages and approaches.
Get to Know Your Computer: DH on the Command Line
John Ladd, Washington University in St. Louis
Thursday May 30, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Baker Hall A53)
Did you know there’s a set of tools on your computer right now that can help you organize projects, run programs, and perform basic data and text analysis? Have you ever been asked to “install a program in the terminal” or “simply run a script” and wondered how to do that? Designed for anyone from beginners who’ve only pointed-and-clicked on their computers to advanced users who have a new project to organize, this workshop will introduce participants to the Command Line Interface: the “terminal” app that lets you interact with your computer through text commands. Without needing to know a programming language, we will dispel any fear of working “under the hood” of our computers, while learning how to install and run software, navigate and batch-process files, and perform a bunch of quick text-mining tasks. Participants will come away with strategies for organizing project files and a better sense of how to make their computers work for them.
Software Requirements: Mac and Linux users already have everything they’ll need! Windows users will want to install Git Bash, which they can download here: https://gitforwindows.org/ (If you have any problems getting this set up, we’ll have time to troubleshoot during the session.)